Staff AI & Data Engineer - HR Systems

Riot’s Enterprise Technology organization ensures Rioters have what they need to unlock their full potential, from secure and compliant systems to efficient business platforms that keep the company running smoothly. HR Tech & Systems builds and evolves the technology ecosystem that supports Rioters across the employee lifecycle.

As a Staff AI & Data Engineer, HR Systems, you will bring deep AI and modern data engineering expertise to HR Systems, accelerating our evolution into an AI-augmented and data-enabled engineering organization. You will be a hands-on builder who designs and delivers AI agents, intelligent automations, data products, and reusable engineering capabilities across Riot's HR Technology ecosystem.

You will combine strong AI and data engineering expertise with meaningful HR technology and domain knowledge. You will work across Workday, Databricks, and Riot's broader AI and enterprise technology ecosystem to turn trusted HR data and complex HR processes into secure, scalable solutions.

Just as importantly, you will help build these capabilities within the existing team. You will pair with HR Tech engineers, establish practical engineering patterns, and provide hands-on mentorship in AI, Databricks, and modern development practices so the team can increasingly design, build, and support these solutions independently.

You will partner closely with HR Tech & Systems, Enterprise Data & AI, Enterprise Software Engineering, HR COEs, and other Enterprise Technology teams.

The role reports to the Senior Manager, HR Tech & Systems.

Responsibilities:

HR Technology Engineering & Automation 

• Apply deep HR technology knowledge to discover opportunities and develop solutions across HR operations, recruiting, onboarding, compensation, benefits, learning, talent, workforce planning, and HR analytics.
• Leverage Riot's evolving AI and automation ecosystem, including tools such as Workato, Windsurf, Devin, and TrueFoundry, to accelerate development and delivery.
• Evaluate opportunities within HR Technology’s workflow and portfolio of applications, including SaaS and custom systems, to establish best practices and introduce new AI-enhanced capabilities.
• Partner with HR stakeholders, product owners, and technical teams to identify high-value opportunities and determine when AI, automation, data products, integrations, or native platform capabilities are the most appropriate solution.
• Translate complex HR processes, policies, and operational needs into scalable technical solutions that improve Rioter experiences and business outcomes.
• Drive solutions through the full lifecycle from discovery and prototyping through implementation, adoption, measurement, and continuous improvement.

AI & Agent Engineering

• Design and build agentic AI solutions using LLMs, RAG, tool calling, memory, orchestration, and APIs to make business-context-aware decisions and take actions within defined guardrails.
• Leverage Databricks AI capabilities—including Unity Catalog, model serving, and vector search—and select appropriate models, prompting, retrieval, and orchestration patterns based on business needs, performance, scalability, and cost.
• Establish evaluation, testing, and observability practices that ensure AI solutions are accurate, grounded, reliable, safe, measurable, and production-ready.
• Design secure and responsible AI solutions with appropriate identity-aware access, human oversight, transparency, auditability, and controls for sensitive HR data and workflows.
• Partner with Enterprise Data & AI and Security to establish reusable AI patterns, standards, and guardrails, rapidly evaluating emerging capabilities and scaling those that demonstrate measurable business value.

Data Engineering & Architecture

• Design scalable HR data pipelines, products, and domain models on Databricks using medallion architecture and Unity Catalog to provide governed, secure access to trusted HR data.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data across Workday, Databricks, enterprise applications, and AI services using MCPs, APIs, events, pipelines, and modern orchestration patterns.
• Establish data products, contracts, semantic models, and metadata that define ownership, business meaning, quality, lineage, freshness, and appropriate use of HR data.
• Ensure HR data is fit for analytics and AI through clear source-of-truth definitions, standardized business concepts, and strong data quality, privacy, security, and governance practices.
• Design resilient architectures that appropriately balance scalability, performance, reliability, and cost in partnership with Enterprise Data & AI and system owners.

Team Enablement & Engineering Excellence

• Mentor and pair with HR Tech engineers to build AI agents, Databricks solutions, data products, and automations, growing sustainable AI and data engineering capability across the team.
• Establish reusable architectures, development patterns, documentation, and engineering standards that enable the team to independently build and scale solutions.
• Partner with the HR Tech & Systems Development Lead to establish AI/agent observability, reliability, adoption metrics, and SLA/SLO practices while optimizing architecture, model usage, and compute for performance and cost. 
• Partner with technical leaders across Enterprise Technology to align HR Tech solutions with broader architecture and engineering standards.

Required Qualifications: 

• 7+ years of software engineering, data engineering, AI/ML engineering, solution engineering, or related technical experience, with demonstrated experience designing and delivering production solutions in enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building and deploying generative AI and/or agentic AI solutions using LLMs, RAG, tool calling, orchestration, APIs, and modern AI architectures.
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering secure, resilient enterprise integrations within event-driven architectures using MCPs, APIs, webhooks, orchestration platforms, AWS lambda and relevant SaaS capabilities, with robust authentication, authorization, idempotency, retry, and error-handling patterns.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks, including Unity Catalog, medallion architecture, and AI capabilities such as model serving, vector search, or Mosaic AI.
• Experience designing scalable data pipelines, data models, and data products using structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Meaningful hands-on experience with HR technology, HR data, and employee lifecycle processes, including enterprise platforms such as Workday, VNDLY, Greenhouse, or ServiceNow. 
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Data/AI, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Desired Qualifications:

• Deep hands-on experience with Workday, including integrations/APIs, Extend, Prism, reporting, Business Process Framework, or Workday data architecture.
• Experience with MCP, multi-agent architectures, enterprise knowledge systems, semantic search, and advanced RAG architectures.
• Experience with Workato, Windsurf, Devin, TrueFoundry, Microsoft Copilot, or comparable AI development, automation, and deployment platforms.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or another major cloud platform, including CI/CD, DevOps, and production observability. 
• Experience with HR Analytics, workforce planning, talent intelligence, or other HR domain data models.

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes your fellow Rioters, who are the customers of your work. Being a dedicated fan of games is not necessary for this position!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.

It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.

Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:

• Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company data
• Communication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minors
• Accessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networks
• Ensuring a safe interactive environment for players and other Rioters

These duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.